If-then rules are also found in expert systems. These rules of thumb, or heuristics, are searched by a pattern-matching program to determine if certain conditions are met, leading to logical conclusions. Expert systems have been accurate in diagnosing illness, identifying sites for minerals to be mined, and many other tasks where the rules of logic clearly apply. Expert systems have been judged to be ineffective in domains of knowledge which require highly intuitive responses to data, such as psychotherapy or spirituality. They have also been criticized for not satisfying the more grandiose claims some programmers have made for them.

Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus, for example, argue that expert systems are not truly expert. 12 They describe five levels of expertise in the mastery of knowledge (novice; advanced beginner; competence; proficiency; and expertise) and assert that true experts do not proceed by rules of thumb so much as they transcend the rules by leaping intuitively beyond them. Human experts know when to use rules and when to break rules, but expert systems only know how to follow rules. They achieve at best the third level of expertise.

Even if expert systems can not be designed with "meta-rules" which state when to break the rules, they are still valuable tools. Chess programs may not beat grand masters, but they do routinely beat the rest of us. They are rule-based systems that follow the rules to reach viable conclusions. Non-expert humans have at least one meta-rule: if you don't know when to break the rules, follow the rules. Rule-based expert systems are valuable guides for non-experts, and they are excellent tutors.

Ethical decisions have traditionally been rule-based. The book of Leviticus is a large compendium of rules applying to many specific cases. The Ten Commandments cover all of those cases with ten rules which "pack" and transcend the meaning of the Levitical code. The Two Great Commandments in turn pack and transcend the Ten Commandments. Those two may be summarized as: Do the loving thing; or, do love. "Do love," written in our hearts and not in books or on tablets of stone, fulfills the vision of the prophets. For each of us, growth in knowledge and love of God, others, and ourselves is a journey from many specific rules (childhood) to the need for a fixed moral code (adolescence) to responsible behavior based on two rules (adulthood) to maturity (transcend the rules and respond in love). Doing the loving thing characterizes the highest level of "expertise" in the moral and ethical life. To those at a "lower" level of expertise, the absence of rules is frightening, because without rules -- without a fixed system of interpretation of the biblical text, for example, and a series of guidelines corresponding to that single interpretation -- they are lost. As one grows in the moral life, coming to appreciate ambiguity and be flexible in response, rules are internalized and transcended, but if that does not happen, one still has a workable system for making decisions. There are times as well when even experts need to fall back on rules to reach an appropriate response (the moral and ethical life is also recursive). So expert systems may be limited in their capacity to resolve ethical dilemmas, but they are still useful as "training wheels" and tutors.

Expert systems containing heuristics learned from experienced clergy might be of value for novice clergy in isolated places. Contrary to prevailing belief among "knowledge engineers," I believe this kind of knowledge can be codified in a rule-based system because the meaning of the rules is inherent in the text. Wisdom is contingent, that is, not on the formal structure of heuristics or the search-rules which sort them but on content. A printed list of insights is valuable; a means of manipulating the list in order to apply them to specific contexts would be of even greater value. An expert system used in this way is analogous to a complex cross-referenced index in a book. Again, computers are physical symbol systems, indifferent to the meaning of the symbols they manipulate. Expert systems are no less appropriate to the manipulation of intuitive knowledge about human beings or complex real-life situations than books.

Forms which mediate religious experience often become fused with the meaning of the experience. Literalists bind their religious experience to a particular text or translation or a particular form of ritual. They cannot believe that meaning can be mediated by a different translation or the rituals of a different tradition. Insistence on a single correct interpretation of a tradition or text has caused havoc in all religions. Literalists and fundamentalists react with defensive rage to new forms which claim to mediate sacred truth as successfully as their cherished vessals. They ridicule and reject new forms as heretical or demonic. Interactive biblical narratives will provoke ridicule, confusion, and anger before we accept them as nonchalantly as we watch movies based on the Bible.

Scriptural stories -- Gospels, or parts of Gospels, adventures like Acts of the Apostles, histories, and more -- lend themselves to interactive recreation in a way that involves the user in the narrative in a particular role. Narrative simulations are powerful tools for experiencing imaginatively the consequences of a series of choices. The Book of Job, for example, might be recreated, each friend's perspective embodied as a different narrative track. Or a Gospel might include a variety of messiahs, all of which -- except one -- would lead the user through a series of disappointments to a dead-end. Interactive Epistles might invite the reader into a dialogue, either in the role of Paul or the community to which he writes. Or the narrative threads of a story like Judith's or Joshua's might be outlined using contemporary game theory and translated into a new pattern. Is there a "meta-story" which transcends the forms of oral tradition, written text, and electronic interactive narrative? The process of devising new biblical narratives might suggest an answer to that question.

Electronic narratives will not end the world of books, but they will change it. I recall a "novel" which consisted of unbound cardboard pages in a box, each of which contained a fragment of narrative. The reader shuffled the pages and explored the new patterns at each reading. This form of the novel is similar to our children's "choose your own ending" stories. Back-formation from the branching patterns of computer programs has no doubt created this genre, reminding us that successive technologies do not eradicate prior technologies so much as transform them. Computers make feasible branching narratives through Hypertext which are complex, various, and exhaustive in their exploratory power, but they also deepen and extend the domain of printed text.

We do not know what genres will emerge from this rich brew of possibilities. New aesthetic criteria and a new critical vocabulary will evolve in response to new genres. What do we call the sudden juxtaposition of evocative lyrical descriptions with literary quotations, for example, in the interactive text game Trinity from Infocom? How do we distinguish the wit in A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- the program -- from that in the book? What do we call the progressive revelation of an evolving civilization in A Mind Forever Voyaging? 13 What about the multiplicity of levels of abstraction, from hardwired code to user-friendly interface? Is there a way to describe the elegance of abstractions enfolding like wings into one another when a recursive code translates into a recursive narrative which facilitates a recursive spiritual exploration?

The flexibility of an interactive program, freed from the limitations of the printed text, discloses a "horizon of possibility" which is always expanding. While symbolic texts also disclose receding horizons of meaning, because all symbols are inexhaustible, there is but a single option after each word or each page: the next word or the next page; an interactive program provides a multiplicity of options which in turn creates the illusion of endless options -- just like life. It is the difference between two- and three- and even four-dimensional tic-tac-toe.

One day computers will be as much a part of our religious and spiritual lives as books. When we enter churches we may find LCDs instead of prayer books on which the order of worship scrolls. Why provide pages filled with prayers or hymns we aren't using? Moving notes (or bouncing balls?) will guide our singing, and when we come to the sermon, we can print it out if we like, write a note to the preacher, or use the index to find something else in the database -- the computer noting, of course, those who looked elsewhere for edification.

We can no more imagine what is coming than Chaucer could have predicted The Brothers Karamazov or Joyce's Ulysses, or Jesus' disciples, witnessing their master's disdain for the written word -- he wrote only once, in sand, as a mockery, relying otherwise on the spoken word -- could have imagined a printed Bible. Our task is to be faithful to the prompting of the Spirit in our hearts, to our craft and to our calling, and to create the means by which our children might come closer to our God.

1. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word 79. I am deeply indebted to this book and also Ong's Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Cornell University Press, 1977).

2. Ong, p. 80.

3. Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (Pelican Books, 1984).

4. The concept of the computer as a physical symbol system was introduced by Allen Newell and Herbert Simon in an address on the occasion of their winning the Turing Award in 1975. Discussed in Pamela McCorduck, The Universal Machine: Confessions of a Technological Optimist (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985) pp. 75-82.

5. Ong, p. 178.

6. Ong, p. 105.

7. Ong, p. 153.

8. Gerald G. May, M.D. Addiction and Grace (Harper & Row, 1988), p. 38.

9. John Updike, Self-Consciousness (Alfred A. Knopf, 1989) p. 226.

10. Is it possible that the alcoholic's "program" includes a rule defining the point at which drinking to feel good becomes drinking to feel normal, which would "fire" this more general instruction?

11. William Poundstone, The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge (William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1985).

12. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus, Mind over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer (The Free Press, 1986).

13.

Brian Moriarty, Trinity; Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; Steve Meretzky, A Mind Forever Voyaging (Infocom Interactive Fiction).

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1993

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